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THE NORTHWEST IN THE NATION 



BIKNNIAL ADDRKSS 



BEFORE THE 



State Historical Society of Wisconsin 



January 24, 1893 



By THEODORE ROOSEVELT 



[Reprinted from the Proceedings of the Fortieth Annual Meeting.] 



WISCONSIN STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY 
1893 



gQNVH 



THE NORTHWEST IN THE NATION. 



BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT. 

I almost wish I had chosen as a title '•' The Heart of Our 
Country," for I am speaking of the old Northwest, not of 
the new Northwest in the Rocky Mountains and on the 
Pacific Slope, but of what was the Northwest at the begin- 
ning of this century, of the states that ha^e grown up 
around the Great Lakes and in the valley of the upper 
Mississippi, the states which are destined to be the greatest, 
the richest, the most prosperous of all the great, rich and 
prosperous commonwealths which go to make up the 
mightiest republic the world has ever seen. These states, 
among which Wisconsin stands as the proud equal of her 
proud peers, form the heart of the country geographically, 
and they will soon become the heart in population and in 
political and social importance. Favored by a combination 
of soil and climate hardly elsewhere to be found, seated on 
the headwaters of the most important of navigable rivers 
and by the shores of the greatest inland seas of all the world, 
and peopled already by millions upon millions of a peculiarly 
thrifty and enterprising population, the material prosperity 
of these States of the woodland and the prairie is assured 
beyond all perad venture. Although the sowing is little more 
than begun we are already reaping and garnering a golden 
harvest. Yet I should be sorry indeed to think that before 
these states there loomed a future of material prosperity 
merely. I regard this section of the country as the heart of 
true American sentiment : I believe that here our native 
art and our native literature will receive no small portion 
of their full development. And when I speak of the literary 

' Biennial address delivered before the Stale Historical Society of Wisconsin, in the 
Assembly Chamber, Tuesday evening, January 24, 1893. 






THE NORTHWEST IN THE NATION. 93 

development I canaot forbear touching for a moment upon 
that kind of literary development which is promoted by 
just such an institution as that at the request of which I 
am here to-night. If the proper study of mankind is man, 
then the proper study of a Nation is its own history, and 
all true patriots should encourage in every way the asso 
ciations which record the great deeds, and the successes 
and failures alike, of the forefathers of their people. Es 
pecially should such a society as the State Historical 
Society of Wisconsin be encouraged, for it is not only the 
father of all such societies in the West, but it may safely 
be said to have done more in the interests of American his- 
torical study than any other one society of the kind in any 
other state. 

I hope to see you, my countrymen here, act as leaders of 
the American school of political thought, of the school na- 
tive born and reared on our own principles, and in accord- 
ance with our own beliefs, the school which believes in 
fearlessly demanding one's own rights and instantly conced- 
ing the rights of others, which belie v^es in justice to all, and 
frowns upon every species of civil or religious tyranny, 
whether the tyranny of the few or the tyranny of the many; 
in short, the school whose greatest exponent was the great- 
est American of the present century, Abraham Lincoln. I 
can speak to you to-night all the more freely because I know 
that deep in the hearts of every man in this Northwest is the 
belief that he is not only a citizen of his own state, but 
first of all a citizen of the entire United States ; that 
he is an American first and above everythmg : and so 
I, your fellow American, have a right to glory, as you do, 
in every deed of your ancestors, in every feat performed 
by the people of your state as by the people of my own, 
precisely as I challenge as my own, and as all other Ameri- 
cans', every rood of land between the Atlantic and the 
Pacific, from the Red River of the North to the Rio Grande. 

Prior to the Revolutionary War, the history of the North- 
west enters but slightly and remotely into the history of 
the people who founded the United States. The Indians 
who roamed over the soil held relations, sometimes of 



94 WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 

war, sometimes of peace, with the French voyageurs and 
fur traders, who formed little villages here and there in 
the wilderness; and small parties of troops, carrying some- 
times the banner of Spain, more often the haughty standard 
of Britain, here and there erected stockaded forts, and 
exacted or coaxed a precarious allegiance from Indian and 
Frenchman alike. But the Northwest only became a part 
of our country as a consequence of the expedition of that 
adventurous hero, George Rogers Clark. 

The first Continental Congress was a thing of the past; 
the second Contiaental Congress had been held, the Dec- 
laration of Independence signed, Lexington and Bunker 
Hill had been fought, the terrible sufferings of the winter 
at Valley Forge had been eadured, Trenton had been won, 
Burgoyne's army had been captured, and the United States 
had definitely taken its position among the nations of the 
earth, and still the country between the Ohio and the Great 
Lakes remained unchanged in the hands of its former 
masters. Then, in the midst of the stress of the Revolu- 
tionary war, Clark, on his own motion, but with the co- 
operation of the great Virginians, Jefferson and Patrick 
Henry, raised a small force of some two hundred hardy 
frontiersmen, descended the Ohio, and falling unexpect- 
edly upon the French towns of the Illinois wrested them 
from the control of Britain. Vincennes, too, fell into his 
hands. The British commandant, marching down with a 
large force of British regulars, French volunteers, and In- 
dian auxiliaries from Detroit, retook the latter ; but Clark, 
striking across country with a resolute band of picked 
rifiemen, defying every species of fatigue and hardship, 
surprised and captured the British garrison. From that 
time on the flag of the United States floated without seri- 
ous molestation in the country adjoining the Ohio : and by 
the treaty of 1783 the entire Northwest was awarded to the 
United States. Nevertheless, the British remained in pos- 
session for a dozen years longer, and a series of desperate 
wars was waged by the United States armies against the 
Northwestern Indians, who were supplied with arms and 
ammunition, and even with allies and leaders, from the 



THE NORTHWEST IN THE NATION. 95 

British trading and military posts of the Great Lakes; and 
it was not until after Mad Anthony Wayne won the battle 
of the Fallen Timbers from the Shawnese. Wyandottes, 
Dela wares, and their confederates, and until Jay, with the 
approval of Washington, had negotiated his treaty with 
England, that the entire country passed under American 
control. 

The Northwest was not won as was the Southwest. In 
the Southwest it was the individual initiative of the front- 
ier settlers which added to our country state after state. 
This was true in the days when Daniel Boone crossed 
through the frowning Alleghany forests and wandered to 
and fro for months in the beautiful country of Kentucky 
without seeing a human face; in the years when the free 
settlers formed on their own motion the short-lived and 
well-nigh forgotten commonwealths of Wautauga, Tran- 
sylvania, Franklin, and Cumberland, and out of them built 
the states of Kentucky and Tennessee; at the time that 
Andrew Jackson led his pioneer soldiery against the Creeks, 
and again when Austin brought his first colony to Texas, 
a,nd Davy Crockett fell at the Alamo, and Houston won the 
battle of San Jacinto. The movements of the South west- 
erners were in advance of governmental action. 

In the Northwest, too, there was much movement of the 
same sort. The stark frontier fighters, the pioneer settlers, 
the backwoods hunters, men like Brady and McCullough, 
Weitzel and Mansker, of English, Scotch. Irish and Ger- 
man stock, with a few Huguenots and Hollanders mixed 
in (men of the kind immortalized in the works of Fenni- 
more Cooper), were cast in the same mould, whether they 
dwelt in the valleys of the Monongahela and the Alle- 
ghany, or in those of the Cumberland and the Tennessee. 

They were stout of body and strong of will, these our 
pioneer forefathers.- They had the typically American 
capacity for self-help; they were self-reliant of spirit, and 
on the other hand they possessed also the power of organi- 
zation and combination. Each man struck off into the 
wilderness by himself, provided with the two characteristic 
weapons «nd tools of the American backwoodsman, the 



q6 WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 

long rifle and the shapely light-headed axe. Each cleared! 
a section of the forest for himself, built his own rude log 
cabin, tilled with his own hands the stump-dotted clearing,, 
and protected himself by his own skill and prowess against 
the assaults of brute or human foes. But as rapidly as the 
settlers became at all numerous they united to form some 
kind of town, county, or village government, electing their 
own peace officers to supervise their domestic concerns, 
'precisely as they elected their own military leaders in time 
of warfare against the savages. Each little community 
took as a matter of right a full measure of local self-gov- 
-ernment from the beginning, and at the same time accepted 
in an almost equal matter-of-course way the primary fact 
that all these communities were to be regarded as united 
in a national whole. This attitude of mind, this combina- 
tion of individual liberty on the one hand, with on the 
other a strong sense of nationality and appreciation of that 
orderly government which can only come through the 
supremacy of law, and by the recognition of the headship 
of the federal authority, was highly typical. It marks- 
the sharp contrast between the successful settlement of the 
country north of the Rio Grande by the men of our people,^ 
and the disintegration and bloody chaos through which the 
South American republics are passing in emerging from 
the condition of colonial vassalage into that of sovereign 
statehood. 

It is very interesting to read of the ways of life and 
habits of thought of these old pioneers, especially in their 
own journals and records, couched in the vigorous, homely 
English which was the tongue of their ordinary household 
use. As we read these documents they bring before us 
the pictures of the pioneers themselves as they went about 
their various pursuits and duties. We can see the family 
or group of families journeying wearily through the wil- 
derness, the laden pack animals driven in single file, with 
may be a gaunt cow or two and a yoke of oxen; the women 
ride, and the young children are carried in panniers on 
some quiet old horse, the boys drive the loose stock, and 
the older men slouch ahead, rifle on shoulder, ever alert for 



THE NORTHWEST IN THE NATION. Q7 

ambush a,nd sudden attack. Or, perhaps they drift down 
•some broad river in hup^e flat- bottomed, square-ended scows, 
always in dread of the Indians wlien they have to land at 
night, or when the current sweeps them too near the im- 
penetrable forests which line the banks. We can see the 
•cabin with its walls of chinked, unhewn logs, its puncheon 
floor, great fire place and rude furniture, the skins of 
bear, elk, or buffalo lying on the bed; and the block houses 
and stockaded hamlets in which the population gather 
for refuge during Indian forays; and the rude log school 
house and the rude I04 meeting house which are raised in 
•each straggliny; frontier village as the children of the set- 
tlers grow lip. We can see t^e stark husbandman wielding 
his ax or tilling the ground, while his wife indoors is busy 
with that woman's work which never ceas-s, whether get- 
ting ready the dinner to which the men are summoned from 
the fields by a blast from the conch shell, or working on the 
homemade garments with which her family are clothed. 
The hunters, the daring Indian fight-rs, stand out in their 
picturesque dress, with their fringed leggins and their 
tasseled hunting shirts belted in at the waist wiih the 
girdle from which hang tomahawk and hunting knife, and 
wearing on their heads caps of coon skin or wolf skin. 
Or again, brief records bring before us the magistrjtes of 
the little colony assembled in the improvise 1 court house to 
deal out that justice which is in accordance with the spirit 
rather than in the letter of the law. 

These frontiersmen lived a life which is now fast vanish- 
ing away; there is no longer any frontier; and yet even 
to-day their analogues can be seen in the farther west. 
There they are the heroes of rope and revolver, who wander 
their lives long over the great plains, guarding the innu- 
merable herds of branded cattle and shaggy horses, or liv- 
ing as hunters and trappers in the innermost recesses of the 
Rockies. The grim hunters of the mountains and wild 
rough-riders of the plains are the true spiritual descendants 
and representatives of that hardy frontier folk which, dar- 
ing the mystery of the unknown, plunged into the vast 
forests of the Ohio basin and into the regions lying around 



98 WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 

the Great Lakes, and in their blood and sweat laid the 
foundations of fair states. 

Nevertheless, fully admitting the immense part played in 
the history of the Northwest by the essentially American 
spirit of individualism, which was so conspicuous in the 
southwest, another fact must be taken into account. The 
Northwest, unlike the Southwest, was essentially the child 
of the federal government; it was essentially the creature 
of the union, and it is right and fitting that it should now 
be the heart and head of the union. Whereas in most of 
the southwest the struggle against the original lord of the 
land, whether Indian or Spaniard, was made by the front- 
iersmen fighting for their own hand, in the Northwest the 
decisive and telling conflicts were those waged by federal 
armies commanded by federal generals — although of course 
in the ranks of these armies the sinewy pioneers them- 
selves usually formed the bulk of the force. It was a 
national army, organized under the direction of Washing- 
ton and led by that fine old Revolutionary hero, Mad 
Anthony Wayne, which won the fight of the Fallen 
Timbers from the warriors of the banded tribes of the 
Northwest, within sight and hearing of the British fort 
whence these Indians had drawn their supplies and arms. 
A few years later we were again plunged into war with the 
Indians and British for the possession of this region, and 
the British commissioners appointed to negotiate a treaty 
of peace at first insisted that there should be established 
here in the Northwest, including this very state, a great 
neutral zone of territory between the United States and 
Canada, to be allotted in perpetuity to the Indian tribes. 
That this was not done was due to the final outcome of the 
dreary campaigns which began with the triumph at Tippeca- 
noe, were rendered memorable by such disasters as that of 
the River Raisin, and closed with the victorious fight on the 
River Thames, in Canadian territory; while the American 
commissioners at Ghent, acting for the whole nation, stood 
firmly for the western people; and the decisive battle was 
that won by Perry and the national squadron on Lake Erie. 
Thus here again we see the struggle for the Northwest 



THE NORTHWEST IN THE NATION. 99 

maintained by the federal armies under federal leadership, 
and backed by federal diplomacy. 

It was thus with the affairs of peace quite as markedly 
as those of war. Whereas the Southwestern territories 
grew each as seemed right in its o vn eye, the stites around 
the Great Lakes sprang into being under that famius ordi- 
nance, almost the last passed by the Contin* ntal Congress, 
which prohibited all slavery in the Northwestern Terri- 
tory. Several times attempts wt re made by the Terrional 
legislatures to get congress to nullify this ordinance, but in 
each instance congress steadily refused. The far-reaching 
effects of this action of the national government upon the 
welfare and prosperity not only of the Northwest but of the 
whole union are incalculable and almost incredible; and 
th's was a boon gained by the action of the federal govern- 
ment itself. In the same way the first permanent settle- 
ment of American citizens beyon t the Ohio was undertaken 
with the direct aid and encouragement of the central 
authorities. 

Thus the old Northwest, the middle or northern west of 
to day, was the true child of the federal government, and 
the states now composing it, the states lying around the 
Great Lakes and in the valley of the upper Mississippi, 
sprang into being owing to the direct action of the union 
founded by Washington. It was a striking instance of his- 
toric justice that in the second great crisis of this nation's 
history, the Northwest, the child of the union, should 
have saved the union, and should have developed in 
Abraham Lincoln the one American who has the right to 
stand along side of Washington; while it was from the 
Northwest that those great soldiers sprang, under whose 
victorious leadership the Northern armies fought to a fin- 
ish, once and for all, the terrible civil war. It was the 
Northwest which preserved the union in the times that 
tried men's souls, and it is the Northwest which to-day 
typifies alike in inner life and in bodily prosperity those 
conditions which give us ground for the belief that our 
union will be perpetual, and that this great nation has be- 
fore it a career such as in all the ages of the past has never 
been vouchsafed to any other. 



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